This book covers the crucial period of Irish history from the completion of the Tudor conquest of Ireland and the end of Gaelic resistance to the temporary achievement of political stability in the early eighteenth century. This was a period of not entirely successful attempts to turn Ireland into a kingdom that was thoroughly English in terms of land settlement, law and government. It was also a period of revolts, suppression and the threat of invasion – of the Ulster plantations, Cromwell’s campaigns, the massacres of Drogheda and Wexford and the Battle of the Boyne– iconic events which laid the foundations for many centuries of trouble to come.